Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

Markus Wolf, the head of GDR espionage, a man of visibly impressive ability, whom I got to know when a Dutch TV station organized a conversation between him and myself on the Cold War, told me that he had come to the conclusion in the late 1970s that the GDR system would not work. Even so, in the last moments of the GDR he came out publicly as a communist reformer – an unusual stance for an intelligence chief. In 1980 the Hungarian Janos Kornai’s book The Economics of Shortage already provided the classical analysis of the self-contradictory operations of Soviet-style economies. In the 1980s, a decade when these economies were visibly running down (unlike the post-Mao Chinese economy), communists in the Soviet bloc countries with elbow-room – Poland and Hungary – were already, it was clear, preparing for a shift. The hard-line regimes in Prague and Berlin had nothing to rely on except the potential intervention of the Soviet army, which was no longer on the cards since Gorbachev had taken over in the USSR. In Eastern Europe as in the West, Communist Parties were decomposing. Soon the Soviet Union itself would decompose. An historical epoch was ending. What was left of the old international communist movement lay beached like a whale on a shore from which the waters had withdrawn.

Late in the 1980s, almost at the end, an East German dramatist wrote a play called The Knights of the Round Table. What is their future? wonders Lancelot. ‘The people outside don’t want to know any more about the grail and the round table … They no longer believe in our justice and our dream … For the people the knights of the round table are a pile of fools, idiots and criminals.’ Does he himself still believe in the grail? ‘I don’t know,’ says Lancelot. ‘I can’t answer the question. I can’t say yes or no …’ No, they may never find the grail. But is not King Arthur right when he says that what is essential is not the grail but the quest for it? ‘If we give up on the grail, we give up on ourselves.’ Only on ourselves? Can humanity live without the ideals of freedom and justice, or without those who devote their lives to them? Or perhaps even without the memory of those who did so in the twentieth century?

10

War

I

I arrived back in England just in time for the war to start. We had expected it. We, or at least I, had even feared it, though no longer in 1939. This time we knew we were already in it. Within a minute of the prime minister’s old, dry voice declaring war, we had heard the wavy sound of the sirens, which to this day brings back the memory of nocturnal bombs to any human being who lived through the Second World War in cities. We were even surrounded by the visible landscape of aerial warfare, the corrugated iron of shelters, the barrage balloons tethered like herds of silver cows in the sky. It was too late to be afraid. But what the outbreak of war meant for most young men of my generation was a sudden suspension of the future. For a few weeks or months we floated between the plans and prospects of our pre-war lives and an unknown destiny in uniform. For the moment life had to be provisional, or even improvised. None more so than my own.

Until my return to England I had not really come to terms with the implications of the family’s emigration. I now discovered myself not only without a known future for an unpredictable period, but also without a clearly discernible present, unanchored and alone. The family home was gone, and so was the family. Outside Cambridge I had nowhere in particular to go, though I would not be short of comrades and friends to put me up, and I was always welcomed in the only available household of London relatives, the ever-reliable Uncle Harry’s. I had no girlfriend. In fact, for the next three years, when I came to London I lived a nomadic sort of existence sleeping in spare beds or on the floors of various flats in Belsize Park, Bloomsbury or Kilburn. From the moment I got called up, my only permanent base was in a few crates of books, papers and other belongings which the head porter of King’s allowed me to store in a shed. I packed them after my call-up. I thought of them reemerging after the war, with luck, like a Rip van Winkle whose life had stopped in 1939 and who now had to get used to a new world. What world?

The war had begun to empty Cambridge. As the former staff of Granta had already dispersed, I asked the printers to close the journal down for the duration, thus formally burying an essential component of pre-war Cambridge. Research on my proposed topic of French North Africa was now pointless, though I went through the motions, background reading, hitchhiking to the British Museum when necessary and when the snowdrifts of an unusually freezing winter made it possible.

What is more, since the line-change of the autumn of 1939, it was not the war we had expected, in the cause for which the Party had prepared us. Moscow reversed the line which the Comintern and all European Parties had pursued since 1935 and had continued to pursue after the outbreak of war, until the message from Moscow came through. Harry Pollitt’s refusal to accept the change demonstrated that the leadership of the British Party was openly split on the issue. Moreover, the line that the war had ceased to be anti-fascist in any sense, and that Britain and France were as bad as Nazi Germany, made neither emotional nor intellectual sense. We accepted the new line, of course. Was it not the essence of ‘democratic centralism’ to stop arguing once a decision had been reached, whether or not you were personally in agreement? And the highest decision had obviously been taken. Unlike the crisis of 1956 (see chapter 12) most Party members – even the student intellectuals – seemed unshaken by the Moscow decision, though several drifted out in the next two years. I am unable to remember or to reconstruct what I thought at the time, but a diary I kept for the first few months of my army service in 1940 makes it clear that I had no reservations about the new line. Fortunately the phoney war, the behaviour of the French government, which immediately banned the Communist Party, and the behaviour of both French and British governments after the outbreak of the Soviets’ winter war against Finland made it a lot easier for us to swallow the line that the western powers as imperialists were, if anything, more interested in defeating communism than in fighting Hitler. I remember arguing this point, walking on the lawn in the Provost’s garden in King’s with a sympathetic sceptic, the mathematical economist David Champernowne. After all, while all seemed quiet, if not somnolent, on the western front, the only plans of the British government for action envisaged sending western troops across Scandinavia to help the Finns. Indeed, one of the comrades, the enthusiasic public school boy and boxing half-blue J. O. N. (‘Mouse’) Vickers – he actually looked more like a large weasel than a mouse, thin, quick and mobile – was due to be sent there with his unit when the Russso-Finnish war ended. For communist intellectuals Finland was a lifeline. I wrote a pamphlet on the subject at the time with Raymond Williams, the future writer, critic and guru of the left, then a new, militant and obviously high-flying recruit to the student Party. Alas, it has been lost in the course of the alarums and excursions of the century. I have been unable to rediscover a copy. And then, in February 1940, I was at last called up.

The best way of summing up my personal experience of the Second World War is to say that it took six and a half years out of my life, six of them in the British army. I had neither a ‘good war’ nor a ‘bad war’, but an empty war. I did nothing of significance in it, and was not asked to. Those were the least satisfactory years in my life.

Although I was clearly not the military type, and still less a potential commander of men, the main reason why I wasted my country’s time and my own during most of my twenties was almost certainly political. I had, after all, some qualifications relevant to a war against Nazi Germany; not least a native knowledge of German. Moreover, as a rather bright history student at King’s, whose intelligence veterans of the First World War were given the responsibility of recruiting for the future staff of Bletchley, and which sent seventeen of its dons there, it is inconceivable that my name would not have crossed the mind of one of these. It is true that I lacked at least one conventionally accepted qualification for intelligence work, namely doing the Times crossword puzzle. As a central European I had never grown up with it, nor did it interest me. It is also true that I did not rate highly on the other traditional qualification, the one that had got my uncle Sidney into codebreaking in the First World War, namely chess. I was an enthusiastic but very far from distinguished player. Still, had I not been quite so public and prominent a bolshevik as an undergraduate, I rather think that I would not simply have been left in Cambridge to await the decisions of the East Anglian call-up authorities.

On the other hand, the official view that someone of such obvious and recent continental provenance and background could not, in spite of his and his father’s passports, be a 100 per cent real